Why The WWE Is A Dream Job For One Of The Most Powerful Women In Sports

Michelle Wilson of WWE, second from left, with Lawrence Leibowitz, Linda McMahon and Stephanie McMahon Levesque at the New York Stock Exchange in 2009. Wilson is No. 9 on our list of The Most Powerful Women In U.S. Sports. (Photo by George Napolitano/FilmMagic)

By 2009, Michelle Wilson was on a clear trajectory to be the first female commissioner of a major sports league. She had her MBA from Harvard, had blue-chip consumer product experience that included marketing to the NFL and NASCAR, had traveled the globe for the NBA to expand its footprint, and had brought innovation to the U.S. Tennis Association that doubled the profit of the U.S. Open. She was highly regarded with an untainted image, and had amassed a contact list that stretched to the corner offices of nearly every big league.

But when the board of the USTA made her an offer to stay on the conventional path for another five years, she declined. She chose instead to veer from traditional sports and into the sports entertainment world of WWE.

“My career has definitely been more of a theme park ride than a climb up the corporate ladder,” said Wilson. That ride has taken her her to her current dream job, as she called it.

It is not that working in scripted professional wrestling was specifically on her mind in B-school, but working in sports and disrupting the landscape was.

“Coming out of business school, I didn’t do what everyone did. I didn’t go into investment banking or management consulting like everyone else,” explained Wilson. “I was, and still am, more attracted to what Harvard taught us in case studies – not to settle for standard, run-of-the-mill, but to create and build.”

Wilson recalls one of the trickier parts on her journey was just finding her way into sports. Out of Harvard Business School, she pursued typical avenues, knocking on league doors. But since she was neither a lawyer nor an athlete, she was out of luck. She set her sights on finding another way in.

Her first job at Nabisco gave her the perfect entry. While running the profit and loss of several major brands, including A1 steak sauce and Grey Poupon, she worked on commercial deals with the NFL's Monday Night Football and NASCAR. That helped her get the attention of David Stern, the NBA commissioner at the time, who in 1997 was looking for help expanding the league globally. Wilson interviewed with him on a Friday and resigned from Nabisco the following Monday.

“I had to learn to speak the language. The league was not about the bottom line but about measuring brand and fan metrics,” said Wilson. “But I had worked internationally with Nabisco. So I brought principles of moving merchandise across the waters and ended up traveling the world with the NBA.”

Her three years there included working with current NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Mark Tatum, now the deputy commissioner and COO. (They still occasionally bump into each other. Wilson says they have a healthy competition about innovation, watching each other in the digital space.)

She also crossed paths with Val Ackerman, No. 5 on our Most Powerful Women In U.S. Sports list, who was running the WNBA at the time. “She was my role model,”Wilson said.“She was one of the first female trailblazers in sports and showed me what was possible.”

In 2000, the dot.com industry was booming, and Wilson felt ready to take a risk. A former Nabisco colleague working for Vince McMahon called her and told her about an opportunity to help launch the XFL with the backing of NBC and Dick Ebersol. Wilson recalls colleagues questioning her decision to leave a major league for a startup. But after speaking with McMahon, she was sold on the opportunity of creating a business from scratch with something she described as “a renegade attitude.”

She joined as one of the first 10 employees and recalls many all-nighters. She called on relationships she had at the NBA, including Spaulding, which made the league’s game balls, and Champion, which made the jerseys. She was involved in the decision to let players wear nicknames on their back – an idea she points out other leagues later copied for promotional purposes. And she got in on the internet action. She was the driver behind selling season tickets online – one million to be exact – and the league was the only one that did it at the time. Unfortunately, the XFL folded in 2001 after one season.

“I have no regrets. It was one of the best jobs I have ever had,” Wilson stressed.

“If you can find something you can do that makes you happy that you may fail at, go do it. You learn so much along the way. You learn about yourself personally and the kind of organization you want to work for.”

Although she didn’t find any other XFLs out there, Wilson had no trouble finding other work. Almost immediately, she accepted a job overseeing marketing at the U.S. Tennis Association, lured by Arlen Kantarian, a former executive from the NFL and Radio City Entertainment who was hired as CEO to infuse energy into the sport. Over nine years, they doubled the profit of the U.S. Open and pushed innovation on a sport steeped in tradition. They added instant replay, music between set changes, and big video boards. Most notably, Wilson was behind changing the U.S. Open court to blue – a color that has since swept across the country’s courts – and she consulted with stars like Roger Federer to get it right.

One of her proudest accomplishments during her nine-year rise to CMO with the USTA was renaming the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park tennis complex after Billie Jean King, ranked No. 6 on our Most Powerful Women In U.S. Sports list.

“My mom was a huge fan of hers. One day in a meeting together, we called my mom, and my mom started crying,” Wilson recalled, describing the personal meaning of the experience. “But she was an inspiring force at work. She told me: ‘Don’t be afraid to speak up. You’re lucky to be in this seat. That’s a privilege.’”

But then McMahon came calling again. He was looking for help repositioning WWE as family entertainment. And he had the magic words – he wanted to create and build. He tasked her with launching a network, something that she had zero experience doing and that would involve disrupting the company's traditional pay-per-view model, i.e. its revenue.

“I didn’t know it would be successful. But fear is a motivator; it makes me work harder,” Wilson said about how she handled the unknown of the situation. There were public detractors. But McMahon was unwavering about moving forward with it. “He said, ‘Michelle, success is the best revenge.’”

WWE Network, a direct-to-consumer subscription service, launched in 2014, when only aggregators Netflix and Hulu were in the space. While it initially lost money, Wilson said it was a calculated risk that paid off. Today the network boasts 1.5 million subscribers – a number that swells to two million around WrestleMania – and is available in 180 countries. It, along with the company’s 20 million subscribers on YouTube (the most of any sports league) and its 850 million social media followers, has put WWE at the forefront of sports in the digital space.

As chief marketing and revenue officer, Wilson led WWE to its fourth straight year of record revenue last year ($801 million). Because of that, the 52-year old Wilson celebrated her nine-year employment anniversary last month with a promotion to co-president of the company, along with George Barrios, the former chief strategy and financial officer.

Asked if she is still on that trajectory to be the first female commissioner of a major sports league, she says: “Yes. I think about it from time to time. We’ll see. Whether it’s me or not, though, I certainly hope to see it happen soon.”